Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
English (1800-
present)
ELIZABETH
JAMES
ENGLISH
OLIVER
RESTORATION,
ACT
OF SETTLEMENT (1701), provision by Parliament for throne to be transferred to German house of Hanover
ACT
OF UNION (1707), England and Scotland united to form Great Britain I (r. 1714-1727), greatgrandson of James I, could not speak English, begins Hanover (German) dynasty (five kings) which ended with Queen Victoria
III (r. 1760-1820), independence of American colonies (1783); beginnings of industrial revolution; eventual insanity of king
GEORGE
GEORGE
WAR
WITH FRANCE (1789-1815), English against French Revolution and later against Napoleon I (Emperor of France, 18041814); English victories by Nelson at Trafalgar (1806) and finally by Wellington at Waterloo (1815), Napoleon's death (1821). incorporated to England 1801
IRELAND
English
QUEEN
WORLD WORLD
PRINTING: William Caxton, introduction of printing to England in 1474; fixing of spelling; literacy; translations of classics; loanwords from Latin and Greek
RENAISSANCE: Interest in classical learning; many loanwords; attempts to improve English according to vocabulary, grammar, and style of classical languages like Greek and Latin New vocabulary developed for technical and scientific work; also new words related to exploration, discovery, and colonialism
REFORMATION:
Henry
VIII's disputes with the Pope; Church of England; Bible translations into English, Authorized Version 1611 (King James Bible)
ECONOMY: Wool production, large sheep pastures, migration to cities, urbanization, rise of middle class, upward mobility
dilution
of dialectal differences through population blending at urban centers class quest for "correct" laguage usage; production of authoritarian grammar handbooks
middle
ECONOMY:
Industrial
Revolution: more intensive urbanization, technical vocabulary based on Latin and Greek roots, decreased literacy due to child labor
Defeat
of Spanish Armada 1588, control of seas, acquisition of colonies throughout the world (Bermuda, Jamaica, Bahamas, Honduras, Canada, American colonies, India, Gambia, Gold Coast, Australia, New Zealand); many loanwords from languages of the colonies used to designate new and exotic products, plants, animals, etc., spread of English around the world
BRITISH EMPIRE
Gradual
expansion of British power since the days of Elizabeth I, culminating in British dominion over about one quarter of the world around 1922 and then declining until its dissolution in the last decades of the twentieth century
AMERICAN REVOLUTION:
Separation of English and American speakers, beginning of multiple national English varieties
SCHOLARLY WRITING
17th
c. scholarly writing still mostly in Latin, (e.g. Newton, Francis Bacon); middle class embraced English as scholarly language during18th c.
LINGUISTIC ANXIETY:
perceived
lexicon inadequacies, borrowing from Latin, deliberate attempts to improve the language; Sir Thomas Elyot, introduction of neologisms(e.g. consultation, fury, majest y) critics of borrowings and neologisms called them "inkhorn terms" (Thomas Wilson, Roger Ascham, Sir John Cheke); John Cheke tried to translate the New Testament using only native English words
LINGUISTIC ANXIETY:
Attempt
to preserve "purity" of English, reviving older English words; archaizers like Edmund Spenser (1552-1599); compounding of English words: Arthur Golding (1587): "fleshstrings" (instead of the French borrowing "muscles"), "grosswitted" (instead of the French borrowing "stupid") Others tried to produce native English technical vocabulary: threlike (equilateral triangle), likejamme (parallelogram), endsay (conclu sion),saywhat (definition), dry mock (irony)
LOANWORDS:
Greek
and Latin technical vocabulary; continued borrowing from French (comrade, duel, ticket, volunteer), also Spanish (armada, bravado, desperado, peccadillo), Italian (cameo, cupola, piazza, portico)
Cheke (1569): proposal for removal of all silent letters Sir Thomas Smith (1568): proposal to make letters into "pictures" of speech; elimination of redundant letters like c and q; reintroduction of thorn (), use of theta for []; vowel length marked with diacritical symbols like the macron (a horizontal bar on top of a vowel to indicate a long sound)
proposals by John Hart (1570): proposals for use of diacritics to indicate sound length; elimination of y, w, c, capital letters William Bullokar (1580): proposed diacritics and new symbols, noted the desirability of having a dictionary and grammar to set standards; Public spelling eventually became standardized (by mid 1700's), under influence of printers, scribes of Chancery
DICTIONARIES: desire to refine, standardize, and fix the language William Caxton, French-English vocabulary for travelers (1480) Richard Mulcaster's treatise on education,The Elementarie (1582), 8,000 English words but no definitions Roger Williams's Key into the Languages of America (1643) First English dictionary, Robert Cawdrey's A Table Alphabeticall (1604), 2,500 rare and borrowed words, intended for literate women who knew no Latin or French, and wanted to read the Bible; concern with correctness
DICTIONARIES:
John
Bullokar's An English Expositor (1616), marked archaic words Henry Cockeram's English Dictionarie (1623), including sections on refined and vulgar words and mythology Thomas Blount's Glossographia (1656), 11,000 entries, cited sources and etymologies John Kersey's A New English Dictionary (1702), first to include everyday words
DICTIONARIES:
Nathaniel
Bailey's An Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721) and Dictionarium Britannicum (1730), 48,000 entries, first modern lexicographer, ordinary words, etymologies, cognate forms, stress placement Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), 40,000 entries, based on Dictionarium Britannicum; illustrative quotations
DICTIONARIES:
Noah
Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) English Dictionary (OED), dictionary on historical principles; followed model of Johnson's dictionary; origins in 1857 proposals at Philological Society in London; first installment published 1884; first full version 1928; second edition 1989, 290,500 main entries
Oxford
c., movement favoring the creation of an organization to act as language sentinel, keep English "pure"; following the model of the Acadmie Franaise (1635); proponents: scientist and philosopher Robert Hooke(1660); Daniel Defoe (1697); Joseph Addison (1711); Jonathan Swift(1712); Queen Anne supported the idea but died in 1714 and her successor George I was not interested in English; opposition from liberal Whigs who saw it as a conservative Tory scheme; Samuel Johnson's dictionary substituted for academy; John Adams proposed an American Academy
GRAMMARS:
Spirit
of the Age of Reason (17th-18th centuries): logic, organization, classification; attempts to define and regulate grammar of language Notion of language as divine in origin, search for universal grammar, Latin and Greek considered less deteriorated, inflections identified with better grammar
GRAMMARS:
18th
century attempts to define proper and improper usage; aspiring middle classes, desire to define and acquire "proper" linguistic behavior to distinguish themselves from lower classes
GRAMMARS:
18th c. grammarians: attempts to provide rules and prevent further "decay" of language, to ascertain, to refine, to fix; usage as moral issue, attempt to exterminate inconvenient facts: Thomas Wilson's The Arte of Rhetorique (1553) based on classical models Henry Peacham's The Garden of Eloquence (1577), dictionary of rhetorical tropes William Bullokar's Bref Grammar (1586)
GRAMMARS: Alexander Gil's Logonomia Anglica (1621), very tied to Latin Jeremiah Wharton's The English Grammar (1654), accepted lack of inflections Robert Lowth's A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762), most prominent of 18th c. grammars; authoritarian, prescriptive, moralistic tone Joseph Priestley's The Rudiments of English Grammar (1761), more enlightened and liberal attitude towards language usage, awareness of change and conventionality of language features Noah Webster's Plain and Comprehensive Grammar (1784), American grammar, based on common usage but concerned with "misuse" by Irish and Scots immigrants
PHONOLOGY
The
Great Vowel Shift (GVS): Middle English (ME) long vowels came to be pronounced in higher positions, the highest were diphthongized:
GVS examples: ME leef [lf] > Modern English leaf [lif] ME grete [grt] > Modern English great [gret] Early Modern English tea [te] > Modern English tea [ti] ME bite [bit] > Modern English bite [bait] ME hous [hus] > Modern English house [haus]
CONSONANTS
Addition
of phonemic velar nasal ([], as in 'hu/ng/') due to loss of g in final positions; evidence from alternative spellings: tacklin/tackling, shilin/shilling
CONSONANTS
Addition of phonemic voiced alveopalatal fricative [], as in 'mea/s/ure'], the result of a phenomenon known as assibilation which is the development of a palatal semivowel [y] in medial positions (after the major stress and before unstressed vowel: tenner/tenure, pecular/peculiar;when [y] followed s, z, t, d, the sounds merged to produce a palatal fricative or affricate ([], [], [], []): e.g. pressure, seizure, creature, soldier (this phenomenon is known as assibilation); dialectal exceptions and reversals: graduate, immediately, Injun/Indian
CONSONANTS
General
loss of r before consonants or in final position; also regular loss of r in unstressed positions or after back vowels in stressed positions: quarter, brother, March
MISCELLANEOUS ISSUES
*
SPELLING PRONUNCIATIONS:
French
loans spelling [t] as "th" led to [] pronunciation in English, e.g. anthem, throne, author, Anthony, Thames French and Latin words with unpronounced initial "h" led to English words with pronounced initial h: habit, hectic, history, horror (exceptions: hour, honor) (compare heir/heritage)
SPELLING PRONUNCIATIONS:
Apostrophe
used in contractions and extensive use of contractions; Early Modern English preferred proclitic contractions ('tis), while Modern English prefers enclitic contractions (it's) Abandonment of yogh in writing Common nouns often capitalized
SPELLING PRONUNCIATIONS:
comma
replaced the virgule (/) as punctuation for a pause 2nd person singular pronouns (u and thou) disappeared in 17th c; the plural forms (ye/you) prevailed for both singular and plural Verbs:-s and -th were 3rd person singular present indicative endings (e.g.does/doth)
SPELLING PRONUNCIATIONS:
interjections:
excuse me, please (if it please you), hollo, hay, what; God's name used in euphemistic distortions: sblood, zounds, egad full-fledged perfect tense, be as auxiliary for verbs of motion (he is happily arrived); increasing use of have as auxiliary; periphrastic use of do(I do weep, it doth heavier grow); do as auxiliary in questions and negatives (why do you look on me?); phrasal quasi-modals: be going to, have to, be about to; some continued use of impersonal constructions (it likes me not, this fears me, methinks)
SPELLING PRONUNCIATIONS:
syntax
of sentences: influence of Latin, "elegant English," long sentences featuring subordination, parallelism, balanced clauses; bus also continuation of native tradition of parataxis, use of coordinators (but, and, for) fixing of written language obscured dialectal differences; information about dialects from personal letters, diaries, etc; e.g. New England dialect features observable in spellings like 'Edwad', 'octobe', 'fofeitures', 'par', 'warran', 'lan'
superordinate level to subordinate level. For example, skyline used to refer to any horizon, but now it has narrowed to a horizon decorated by skyscrapers('deer' formerly had meant 'animal')
Amelioration: (Also called elevation Linguistics (of the meaning of a word) a change from pejorative to neutral or positively pleasant. The word nice has achieved its modern meaning by amelioration from the earlier sense foolish, silly - 'jolly' had meant arrogant)
The process by which the meaning of a word becomes negative or less elevated over a period of time, as silly, which formerly meant "deserving sympathy, helpless or simple," has come to mean "showing a lack of good sense, frivolous." ('lust' had meant pleasure, delight) Weakening: ('spill' had meant destroy, kill)